SUNSTROKE AND ITS TREATMENT. 299 



space, and drench that well with water, and in five minutes the air in the 

 room will be reduced to that water's temperature. Never mind about breeze. 

 The air will seek the cooler place itself, without being driven in from the 

 outside, and the temperature will decline almost instantaneously to a rea- 

 sonable point. Not one of these expedients necessitates any change of 

 habits, or any expense whatever, though of course a shilling or two laid 

 out for ice will make the improvement more rapid, and in the case of a sick 

 room, or of any one who really suffers from heat — suffers as if in sickness, 

 we mean — will be money will laid out. And so in the case of little children, 

 especially, will a few shillings on the sheet of woven cane — we have unfor- 

 tunately forgotten the trade name — which is used in the hottest corners of 

 the East Indies and China for pillow-cases and sofa-covers. The silica with 

 which this material is coated will not get warm, and qyqyj other covering 

 for beds or pillows with which we are acquainted will. It keeps perfectly 

 dry, cannot get dirty, and can bo procured as soft as any covering that ever 

 was placed upon a mattress. There is hardly any luxury like it in intense 

 and stifling heat, and we have known sick people, half maddened with heat 

 acting on exhausted frames, sleep on it when sleep seemed otherwise unpro- 

 curable. With plenty of wholesome water, wetted blankets for window- 

 curtains, and a sheet of cane, no one in London ought to be rendered sleep- 

 less by heat, or indeed, unless he presists in gorging himself with the food 

 which he needs only in cold weather, to suffer any appreciable discomfort. 

 — Spectator. — Popular Science Monthly Supplement. 



SUNSTROKE AND ITS TREATMENT. 



The sudden accession of heat has already produced one fatal, and 

 more than one severe, case of sunstroke in the metroiDolis. Probably 

 the affection so designated is not the malady to which the term coup de 

 soleil can be properly applied. The condition brought about is an exag- 

 gerated form of the disturbance occasioned by entering too suddenly the 

 "hot" room of a Turkish bath. The skin does not immediately perform its 

 function as an evaj)orating and therefore cooling surface, and an acute 

 febrile state of the organism is established, with a disturbed balance of cir- 

 culation, and more or less cerebral irritation as a prominent feature of the 

 complaint. Death may suddenly occur at the outset of the complaint, as it 

 has happened in a Turkish bath, where the subject labors under some pre- 

 disposition to apoplexy, or has a weak or diseased heart. It should suffice 

 to point out the danger and to explain, by way of warning, that although 

 the degree of heat registered by the thermometer, or the power of the 

 sun's rays, do not seem to suggest especial caution, all sudden changes from 

 a low to a high temperature are attended with danger to weak organisms. 

 The avoidance of undue exercise — for example, persistent trotting or can- 

 tering up and down the Eow — is an obvious precaution on days marked by 



